News

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Spontaneous Orders and the State

Both Long and Johnson support, in principle, spontaneous social
orders, but they make two claims that make me worried about such orders
in general and anarchy in particular:

1. According to Johnson, some dispersed, polycentric, acts are acts of wrongful violence.
2. According to Long, state power itself depends on spontaneous order mechanisms.

If Johnson is right, the anarchist seems to have no reason to reject the state, for the mere rejection of an archē,
a sovereign, does not guarantee a good social order. In other words,
the evil we should be concerned with is not necessarily the evil of the
state. If Long is right, the anarchist seems to have no reason to be an
adherent of spontaneous order, for it may lead to the creation of a
state.